Guava
Two
They lay together in the damp dishevelled silk of their bed. All items of clothing that had once clad their bodies lay strewn around the cold aluminium floor like debris after a hurricane. Their laboured breathing had regained some normality, they no longer panted like wild animals, their moment of carnal lust sated. Braced up on an elbow, D’Enfer lazily toyed with the fine, damp curls of Neo’s chest hair as she gazed down at him, her green eyes heavy-lidded and listless. He, on the other hand, stared straight up at the high ceiling, tracing over the metal sheet plating with all its nuts and bolts as if counting them to distract himself.
His demeanour was... unusually calm.
“Was it good?” she asked softly.
He kept his eyes upward. “Tied down and used like a common plaything? It was diabolical.”
An insult to some, D’Enfer knew it was his way of saying he had loved it. Rolling away from him, she turned onto her stomach and reached to the bedside table to collect her smouldering cigarette from the glass ashtray. “If I’d known you liked to be taken against your will, it wouldn’t have taken me two years in the first place.”
As she slipped the butt between the cushion of her lips she noticed something different about the table but she couldn’t place it. Her handgun, loaded as always, was there along with the aforementioned ashtray and the little alarm clock. So what was—?
She knew. She realised but only a second too late.
The lamp.
Thwack.